Three Months

Three months. Ninety-one days. She counted them.

Ninety-one days of going to work. Of coming home. Of cooking things with too many ingredients because it filled the hours and gave her something to do with her hands. Of checking her evidence log, her phone, her mailbox. Of waiting.

The anonymous mail started in the eighth week. Not from Drake — or not directly. No postmark, no handwriting, no fingerprints that anyone could find. Just envelopes with things inside them: a photograph of Myrna leaving a grocery store, a printout of her work email address with a line circled in red, a list of her appointments for a week in February, cut and pasted from somewhere she could not identify.

She knew where it was coming from. She knew it was him, or someone doing it for him. She filed it all. She photographed it. She added it to the folder that was getting thicker and thicker and she thought about how this was what he did — this was always what he did. Not the direct approach. The approach through other people, other means, the slow accumulation of pressure.

She called Diane. The PI started watching the building.

That was the week she understood she was not going to be fine, not in the way she meant when she said she was fine, but she was going to be okay. She was going to survive this. She was going to do it by building a record so thorough, so complete, so documented that it could not be ignored or dismissed or worked around.

She started on Monday.